“Colours are a Feast for the Eye”
EMIL SCHUMACHER AT 100
14 October 2012 to 27 January 2013

In autumn 2012 the Ernst Barlach Haus is celebrating a double anniversary: in its fiftieth year of existence it pays tribute to Emil Schumacher (1912-1999) in the hundredth anniversary year of his birth.

Few artists have left such a striking and sustained mark on post-war German painting than Emil Schumacher. His abstract, often large-format works have become icons of an era that endeavoured to find a new, liberated visual language for existential questions. Schumacher found it: in an intensive involvement with colour as material he painted auratic canvases whose subject matter is also their own creation. As universal mirrors of the individual, they are a record of hesitation and decisiveness, stunning self-assertion and a seismographic sensibility.

The exhibition Colours are a Feast for the Eye – a dictum of the artist from the year 1958 – concentrates programmatically on Schumacher’s informal work of the late 1950s and the 1960s. This emphasis on the founding years of the Ernst Barlach Haus places an exciting phase of development in the foreground – the decade in which Emil Schumacher developed his unique emblematic repertoire and became what he is: a classic of modernism.